


Each Mortal Thing

by Eliot_L



Category: Longmire (TV)
Genre: F/M, LiteratureNerd!Cady, POV First Person, Poetry, Yet not an AU, bookstore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-17 22:42:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10603791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eliot_L/pseuds/Eliot_L
Summary: A quiet flirtation.





	

The owner doesn’t mind me hanging around the shelves at Big Sky Rare Books after work, even if I never buy anything. Well, ‘never’ isn’t strictly true, I do plenty of Christmas shopping there, and birthdays, basically anytime I need a gift for Dad, they have something appropriate. I’ve been eyeing a leather-bound edition of _Moby Dick_ lately. Maybe be a little on-the-nose.

Today, though, I’m in a more poetic mood. Mom used to read me Dickinson and Wordsworth and Blake at bedtime, and I even developed an appreciation for T.S. Eliot in college, although ‘The Waste Land’ still strikes me as more hype than substance. As I’m running my fingers along their uneven spines, the door creaks and a bell rings far away, I smell fallen leaves among the aging paper and ink. There, a collection by Billy Collins that I don’t own yet. Might be interesting.

In the half-attended voices I hear Jacob’s familiar one, warm and unwelcome. “You know, I think I will look around for a minute, if you’ll hold these here.”I mean, of course he _reads_ , I figured that much, but he never struck me as the rare-books type. I catch myself holding my breath in the small confines of the crowded shelves and burrow further into the collected works of Wallace Stevens. Redheads are the worst at hide-and-seek, though. “Fancy meeting you here.” It takes restraint not to laugh, almost as bad as _Come here often?_

I wait a moment to look up, no deference after business hours. “Sorry, am I in your way?”

“No… no, I’m just wandering.” His eyes scan the shelves, hands in the pockets of his coat. “I didn’t know you were such an avid reader of poetry.” Nice spot for an interrogation, if that’s what this is.

I shrug, parrying his interest. “Just the usual amount.” I shelve Stevens behind me and move aside.

He pulls the same volume of Collins’ work I saw before, and I feel a possessive knot inside like a tangled necklace. “Any recommendations?”

I don’t enjoy these moments, as a rule. I don’t cultivate criticism. I’ve got opinions, sure, but if I wanted to paint them onto a blank slate, I’d have gone into teaching. “Depends what you like. Billy Collins is kind of domestic for my taste, but he was Poet Laureate, so.” He smiles at something in the book. “You could do worse.”

“I admit, I never had much time for poetry.” Not surprising. I can’t imagine it’s his fault — I can guess the more important things he’s had to turn his hand to. “Do you have a favorite?”

I smile in spite of myself, and look up at a volume that — what luck! — hasn’t been sold yet, but I don’t reach for it. “I don’t know that I have a favorite poet, I mean, everyone loves Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda. Mary Oliver’s pretty consistent.” I glance at him in the close space, and immediately feel more observed and exposed than I usually do with my clothes on. It’s not an undressing glance, I know the difference and I don’t think he’d dare, but I feel myself blush regardless, and stall for time. “No poet in particular, just favorite poems.”

“Let me guess, ‘Hope is a thing with feathers.’” He sounds a little proud of himself for being able to parrot such a common line. Maybe he thinks it’s a commentary on my naiveté.

My eyes roll involuntarily. Why do men assume that all women love Emily Dickinson? “Everyone likes that one. Pretty good for a man with no time for poetry, though.” This, apparently, merits a near-silent laugh. “So what were you here looking for?”

“Oh, just a few things I’d ordered.” He returns the slim volume to the shelf and taps his fingers lightly against the unvarnished wood. “Historical interest, mostly.” I was annoyed at being interrupted earlier, but now I find myself reluctant to end our conversation, so I don’t break eye contact with him even when it goes on a bit longer than I’m used to. It isn’t flirtatious, quite. “I never think of lawyers as being particularly poetic.”

Few people do. “I guess I’ve always liked precise language. Legally precise, poetically precise, doesn’t matter. It’s nice when things fit together.”

“It is, I agree.” There’s something in the way he runs his hand over the wood of the bookcase, sanded by the fingerprints of a decade of passing readers. I didn’t think of what I’d said as a double entendre, but I could reconsider. “So are you going to make me keep guessing, or…?” I stall again, half-pretending not to know what he means. “If it’s here, that is. Unless you have it memorized.”

This, unfortunately, is a bit convicting, since I used to, and I’m sure I could stumble through it tolerably in front of anybody else. I realize he hasn’t actually asked me to recite it. For all he knows, it could be Chaucer. “It’s, ah, a sonnet. Not Shakespeare, though. The one that starts, ‘As kingfishers catch fire’?” No recognition, so I pull down the small slipcovered volume from the “Before 1900” section, holding it close and careful, turning to a page near the front and handing it across. “That one.”

His hands have returned to his coat pockets and he tilts his head a bit. “Would you read it to me?” It’s done so quickly I can’t tell if it’s a challenge or an intimacy; there’s an edge and a softness in the question, and knowing him, it’s both. My face assumes a practiced skepticism, and I’m sure he can tell how strange I find all this. I suppose I could say no, tell him to take it home and read it himself if he’s so inclined, but here we are.

“Sure.” Looking down into the familiar page is a relief. After the measured first line, the consonance draws me forward, the pace of the poem running downhill, tumbling into the middle of the stanza. “ _— each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name._ ” When I look up, his eyes are closed and his head slightly bowed, and it occurs to me to wonder when’s the last time I went to church. The rest of the poem goes at a walking, philosophical pace, wherein “ _the just man justices; keeps grace_.” I’d always aspired to that line, and it comforts me to think even the more regrettable acts I’ve committed lately fit under that umbrella if you tilt it a bit. Like I’ve done a hundred times or more, my speech slows over the last two lines, tasting the more figurative words with a fond finality. “ _Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father through the features of men’s faces._ ”

He’s studying me, and neither of us have anywhere else to look now. We’re studying each other. The way the yellow light in here catches against him makes me wish I were a better artist. “Do you really think the world has that kind of… transparency?”

“Not really,” I laugh, glad of an intellectual response. “I mean, yes and no. I don’t think he means our nature can be seen by, you know, other humans.”

“Ah.” He seems comforted by this, and when I’ve re-sleeved the book and am looking back up to see if its valley on the shelf has collapsed inward, I feel it being gently removed from my hands. “Well, if that’s typical of his work, I imagine I’ll enjoy the rest.” I suppose I must look surprised; I never did develop the kind of poker face they want you to have at trial. “I’ll leave you to your perusal, then, Cady. Thanks for your… expertise.”

Before he walks off down the neighboring aisle of paperback mysteries, I shrug and some appropriate acknowledgment escapes me, “Anytime,” or maybe even “You’re welcome,” I can’t recall. I’m still a little unsettled, not least because now he’s bought the book I wanted for myself, and I suspect it’s just a prop for whatever purpose that conversation served, not because he’s any great lover of obscure theological poets. Well, I won’t make the same mistake twice. _The Apple that Astonished Paris_ comes home with me, not that I need to add to the teetering stack of books next to my bed.

Nadine winks at me conspiratorially when she’s ringing me up. “You should give readings,” she says. “Public ones, too.”

“That was definitely a one-time thing.” I try to look as no-nonsense as possible, but she doesn’t seem convinced, and I’m not sure I feel it either. Outside, the autumn air feels too quiet, like something’s waiting. I put the radio on in my car, and by the time I get home I’ve forgotten the whole exchange.

File under ‘Things I should have expected to happen’: three days later, a padded envelope in my inbox, no return address. Inside, that same copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ _Collected Works._ I shake my head at it and laugh, and look to see if Mandy’s around. Coast clear, I slip the book from its enclosure and check to see if it’s been mawkishly or cryptically inscribed. No, but I notice the edge of a red sticky note and open to it, on _The Windhover_. Less substance, but form in spades, a veritable tarantella of wordplay and the furthest thing from clean legal prose. The note, whose hand I recognize, reads, _This one looks like it might take more practice._

Sometimes the men in my life, I swear, I’m not sure whether to laugh or scream. Neither is a precedent I want to set in the office.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem that Cady reads aloud is this one, by G.M. Hopkins:
> 
> As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;  
> As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  
> Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s  
> Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;  
> Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:  
> Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;  
> Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,  
> Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. 
> 
> Í say móre: the just man justices;  
> Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;  
> Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—  
> Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,  
> Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his  
> To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
> 
> [The Windhover](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/windhover) can be read on poets.org; both poems are in the public domain.


End file.
